The Truth About Goals

By now I’m sure you've heard about goals and the importance of having them. They give direction for your journey in life; brings meaning to your actions; sets intentions for the day; and to top it off, if you’re persistent, you reach your goals and reap the rewards. Who doesn’t like setting goals and getting everything you intended to receive? The fulfillment that comes with the attainment of goals are fun but there’s more that comes with the achievements. So what’s the real reward for obtaining your goals and is it true for any goal?

The Goals to Strive For

There are plenty of goals you can set for yourself but the best ones are the ones that inspire you. Setting a goal for something you know you can do is not inspiring. That’s just you working from your past knowledge and staying in your comfort zone.

Let me clarify what I mean by “what you know you can do”. If you can easily run a mile without breaking a sweat, setting a goal to run a mile and a half is not inspiring. That’s something you know you can do, it’s not really a challenge. For that reason you won’t be too engaged in obtaining that goal.

Now if you set a goal to run 5 miles or better yet, run 2 miles close to the same time it takes for you to run 1 mile, this is more of a goal that will stretch you.

These are the goals you might want to set, something that will excite you, something that will cause you to grow as a person. These types of goals add more flavor to life, charting new territories on your life’s road map. Inspiring goals come with better rewards than just simply hitting the goal.

So try setting a goal that’s worthy of you. You have enough potential in yourself that you will be amazed at what you can do if you begin to strive for goals that will draw out your potential and allow your soul to expand.

The Real Reward

When you have a worthy goal, once you obtain the goal, you not only receive what you want, you experience a growth within yourself. It’s not just the material or a title you gain, but who you had to become in order to gain it. The goal stretches you to become a bigger person.

You may have had to learn new things that got you to the goal. Let’s take the goal of getting a degree for an example. Obviously, in order to obtain this goal, you have to learn some new information, write some papers, study and pass exams. You have to continue this for some years until you arrive at your goal but once you;re there, you not only now have your degree, you also have grown from who you used to be to who you are now.

You may say, “That’s a simple one. What about my business or financial goals?”

Let’s say you had a financial goal to double your income in the next year, which you achieved. In order for you to have achieved it, you had to once again become a different person than who you used to be. You had to enhance your skill set in your area of expertise. More productive time had to go into your work for you to be recognized as someone worthy of the increased compensation. So you may have obtained your goal, and what comes with it is the reward of who you’ve become.

The real reward is who you have to become in order to reach your goal. The growth, the experience you receive while reaching for your goal. The lessons learned throughout your journey are the most valuable assets you'll obtain in successfully reaching a goal. Why? Because no matter if the goal is taken away from you or is loss in the future, you know exactly how to obtain that goal again. You now have experience and you can quickly duplicate your previous results and accelerate to your goal again. No more roaming in the dark or taking time to learn what you have to learn, you now are able to apply what you previously learned to produce similar results.

Even better, once you obtain a goal and have the experience you now can set another, bigger goal in which you have a stronger belief in your abilities to obtain that one. Remembering your previous experience with the last goal, you now have a blueprint or and idea of how you can obtain the next one. You know now that if you continuously take action towards to goal and course correct when needed, you will arrive to the bigger goal.

It doesn’t matter what kind of goal it is, as long as it’s a goal worthy of you. Not something that you know you can do, as explained earlier, but something that causes you to stretch. These types of goals will mold you into a better version of yourself. Even a strictly materialistic goal like wanting to have a seven figure income. To be able to reach this goal, you have to grow into a person who earns that amount. You cannot be who you are today and earn that type of income. Growth comes before the reward…Growth is the reward!

The truth about goals is a motivating one. Once you understand the growth that comes with the obtainment of a worthy goal, you will have a good formula for everything else you want to achieve in life. You will experience rewards on top of rewards and your soul will sing because you are allowing yourself to expand and become a bigger being. Bigger than what you used to be. You will gain more faith in your abilities to continue to grow and now you will be able to help others do the same.

Discussion: Have you ever set a goal that inspired you because of it’s magnitude? What did you learn in your process of obtaining that goal? Was it worth it at the end and did it inspire you to continue to expand?